REAL ESTATE FINANCIAL MODELLING: 5 Useful Links
Here are some of our favourite links which might help you improve your modelling skills….
F1F9 Academy
This is our top recommendation if you want to improve your all-round approach to financial modelling. They offer a great 31 day free course, with a 5-10 minute daily lesson sent to you by email. It’s primarily targeted at project finance but really relevant for real estate.
These guys are responsible for producing Rainbow Analyst, a simple auditing add-in for Excel. You can download the free Rainbow Analyst at the homepage, which we use all the time. Recommended functions include highlighting all Input cells and locking all your calculation cells, and colour-coding all formulas (hence the “Rainbow” tag) to spot errors.
Ok this one is for the mega dorks… but it’s a goldmine if you want to find out about financial modelling best practice (How do you know your spreadsheet is right? has 50 rules we should all follow), find training videos or read spreadsheet horror stories to make you feel better.
Real Estate Financial Modelling Blog
US based real estate modelling company, REFM has run training courses at Harvard, Wharton and MIT. Their blog is a treasure trove of useful tips and tricks, including a 60-second skills section (“x-ray mode”, drop-down lists, tips on error checking) as well as more detailed articles.
Argus Software Manuals
The benefits and limitations of Argus Developer / Circle Investor software vs. Excel are a common topic of debate in the UK property industry. It’s undeniable though that less experienced Excel modellers can learn a lot from Argus software – whether from its legible outputs templates or its s-curve formulas (nb. here’s useful link to the Developer Calculations manual, p.27-28 includes the s-curve formula).
prptblog 
An interesting discussion is definitely worth comment.
I do think that you ought to publish more on
this subject, it may not be a taboo subject but usually folks don’t speak about such topics. To the next! Cheers!!